Laid off in Seattle and thinking about the future

Karen and Jay are friends. They go out with other friends every week and share details about their lives.

Now, they get to share something else. Like many people in the age of coronavirus, they've both been laid off.

Jay Craig was a Ride the Ducks captain. He went by the name "Captain Braveliver." He worked there long enough to earn a bobble head in his likeness.

Gamble worked as a yoga instructor at the Ballard Health Club, normally, a relaxing job, but not with coronavirus around.

“There’s been so much stress… and we’ve all been scrambling," Gamble said.

Now that they’re both laid off, they’re each looking at unemployment differently.

I went to see how they’re doing. I started by visiting Craig. He said the Ducks already were struggling with legal costs from an earlier accident. But over the last month, the coronavirus scared away most of their customers.

“There would be days when there were like four ducks scheduled on a nice day, and everybody’d get sent home ... and there’d be just one duck riding around with just four people in it," Craig said. "You know, and there’s just no way ... You can’t do that.”

Craig has been through economic downturns before and this time, he wants to be ready for anything. So he bought an old U-haul and started building a cabin in the back of it. It’s designed to be self-sufficient.

“So water lands on that panel there, and goes into that downspout right there, so that’s how I collect water for my shower,” Craig said while showing off his handiwork. “Let me show you inside.”

Craig sleeps under a big skylight.

“So basically I wake up with the sun, which is awesome," he said. "And at night, I go to bed watching the stars and the moon and all that. And that’s been great. Instead of waking up with an alarm clock, I wake up softly with the sun.".

One of the first things Craig did, when the Ducks started cutting his hours way back, was file for unemployment.

In contrast, his friend Karen Gamble, the yoga instructor, is trying not to.

“I’ve never done that in my life, and I just can’t imagine starting that now," she said. "So I’d like to avoid that.”

She doesn’t want to burden the system, she explained.

Gamble understands why her job ended. At the health club, she had been getting more nervous everyday.

“People were coming to classes and coughing,” she said.

She worried about catching the virus and spreading it, especially to the seniors in her class.

“And one time, I made this mistake: In yoga, we do a lot of breath-work. And we do this thing called 'flutterlips,' and it sounds like: plbplbplb," she said, making a raspberry sound. "And someone just yelled in the middle of class – ‘You can’t do that.’ And it was a mistake, and I said ‘I’m sorry,’ but it was so stressful every day."

So Gamble supports closing gyms like hers. But now, she doesn’t know what to do.

Some enterprising yoga instructors are offering classes online. But Gamble has always been an employee, and she doesn’t feel prepared to run her own business. And so she’s leaning heavily into the hope that the gym will reopen soon.

UPDATE: Karen Gamble will be offering online yoga classes through Seattle's 8 Limbs Yoga starting March 19 at 9:30. For now, the classes are free.

“I have a small savings, so I’ve got about two months that I’ll be OK," she said. "And then after that – I will need assistance.”

And in her case, that loyalty to her old job is paying off. Her old boss, Pat Gilbrough, hired a couple laid off employees as contractors, so they could remodel the gym. And he promised to keep paying for health care for his laid off employees.

“I did not realize that," Gamble said when Gilbrough told me. "Thank you!” she told him.

Karen Gamble's friend Jay Craig is trying to convince her to swallow her pride and file for unemployment.

“There’s no shame in going on unemployment ... when so many people are doing it,” he told her.

All over the country, people are muddling through this difficult time, and sharing stories like this. It’s hard to be laid off. But it’s better with friends.

For his next story, reporter Joshua McNichols is looking for front line workers who cannot work from home. From health care workers to garbage truck drivers, if you must work out in the world, despite the coronavirus, he wants to hear from you at jmcnichols@kuow.org or through Twitter DM @joshuamcnichols.